a collective experience on grief and grieving during war and other catastrophes
premiere: February 9, 2024, 'Khrupkiy' festival at Theatre.doc, Moscow

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'a great grief' is a performative lecture and a set of rituals for the audience. in five parts it tells about the history of grief and mourning in different human cultures, why people (and not only) grieve in general; how grief and lamentation are related to ritual, and ritual is to performance; what role mourners and wailers played in “traditional societies” and why it is almost always a woman's work; what happens to grief when the object of grieving is not one person or a group of people, but entire cities; what has happened to grief, mourning, rituals and attitudes towards death in Western societies in the last 200 years and what does this have to do with normalizing psychology; why are the bodies and lives of some people more mourned than others, how can grief be turned into a political resource, and can grief be grieved to the end?

“over the past two years, many of us have been experiencing emotions that we might not want to have in our lives: anxiety, disorientation, fear, powerlessness, anger. I live with all of these things now too, but I also live with grief. mostly the grief of knowing about the suffering of others that you can do nothing to alleviate, the feeling of great injustice. everyone grieves in their own way, but in some cultures, grieving is a job and a ritual. grieving grounds us in the transience of everything, but it also elevates us: people grieve to restore dignity and value to the victims, to keep their memory alive, to give them the time of their lives, to share silence, numbness and tears with them. in this experience, with the help of a mediator, we offer a space of contact and attention to each other, an opportunity to share our grief or to keep it to ourselves” — vitya vilisov